Under The Radar: Office 2.0

I want to be an evangelist. That seems like a great job. Your job description goes something like "run around and talk about what great stuff you do." Sometimes you get to evangelize to big companies. Sometimes you get to evangelize to startups. And lots of the time, like me, you find yourself on the conference circuit, where there is critical mass of people to be evangelized.

Why this focus on evangelism? I was just looking at the list of panelists for the Under The Radar: Office 2.0 conference coming up next Friday and the first panelist listed is "Jeff Barr, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services." Jeff is a great guy -- needless to say, I've bumped into him at conferences. I similarly first got to know Robert Scoble on the conference circuit when he was still a tech evangelist and pontificating for a living. (But that's a big company thing. Now that he's at PodTech, he has to do some work for a living.) Perhaps the best known evangelist was Apple's Mac Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. Now, best I can tell, Guy is an evangelist for Guy. But he's damn good at it.

In any event, if you are interested in meeting Jeff Barr and learning more about what's happening in the business services space, I would highly recommend attending Office 2.0. Great companies like Stikkit, Teqlo and Mashery will be presenting, as will some returning standouts like EchoSign and iUpload. Increasingly, independent web services are finding their way into small and large enterprises alike. This is clearly a trend that is going to accelerate over time. Office 2.0 is a great opportunity to hear three dozen companies talk about how they are attacking this space. If anyone is interested in attending, register HERE and save some money.

In the mean time, if anyone is looking for an evangelist, I've got the attending conferences part down.

We didn't get into Office 2.0 because she didn't get it. We're releasing SalesWorks, which is based on our Hybrid Web platform, which merges to power of the desktop with the breadth of the web. Things run where it makes sense for tehm to run. Performance is generally much better on the desktop, blowing away even the most nimble Ajax.

We launched SalesWorks at DEMO this year, showing the deep and seamless integration by taking a list of contacts from the desktop app, seamlessly mapping out to MST virtual earth, sooming in on a state, and pulling those contacts back into the desktop app and sending them snail mail.

My problem with "Office 2.0" is that it ignores "Desktop 2.0", with presenters being web-based only, which is really narrow in thinking. the bottom line is customers in the real world don't care so much where something runs, just that it works, it performs very well, and they can get their job done and move on. Most of the world doesn't care about the hype.

Have fun at the conference--I broke my shoulder so I'm not traveling for along time. One last thought--I love evangelism. It's so important if you have something compelling and want developers to invest their time and thought into it. Microsoft is really the king of developer evangelism, and if you're really interested in how it is done well, go to one of their developer conferences.